Bridging the Great Divide

I was brought up on classical music. My parents loved music and my dad was an amateur opera singer. My piano teachers were all traditional teachers who had me play exclusively from the written page (even though I had a great ear and could play almost anything I heard by ear). By the time I was in high school, however, I was listening to Dylan, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and other great songwriters of the 60s, and all but lost interest in classical music. I took up the guitar and sang and played the pop music I loved on guitar, much to the despair of my parents. But after high school my love of classical music returned and I went to a conservatory and went back to playing mostly classical music.

After graduating, in order to make a living, I began playing for theatre, including doing some improvising. It was tremendous fun. It was then I began to regret that I hadn't devoted more time to learning and becoming adept at playing pop and jazz on the piano; I would have been able to make a better living by playing for events, playing in restaurants, cafes and other such venues. I knew barely a handful of pianists who could play both classical and popular music. Most of us felt we had to choose one or the other.

To a large degree, the classical world looked down its nose at pop music as inferior, and the pop and jazz world thought classical musicians were straight-laced and inflexible. Forty years later, I find this attitude still prevails. And the majority of the piano teachers that are to be found still teach only classical; they don't encourage their students to try other genres, and wouldn't know how to teach those styles if the students were interested.

Although I have played pop and Broadway for over 30 years, I began playing jazz only about ten years ago, and have found this style of playing to be wonderfully fun and satisfying. I love the songs of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and many others. I love the music of Broadway, from Rogers and Hammerstein to Steven Sondheim. I love a great deal of pop music. Equally important, OTHER people love this music, and being able to play it enables me to play for a wide variety of events such as parties and weddings and provide pleasure to a great number of people. It also enables me to teach these styles.

Most of my students have come to me largely because of my ability to teach a variety of styles. Many of them, from kids to adults, came from other teachers who taught only classical. Not only did their previous teachers give them only classical pieces, but it was all from books, nothing by ear, and their methods and approach were rigid and not very fun. I have many students who come to their first lesson and play a Chopin Nocturne for me, but can't play Happy Birthday by ear and harmonize it with three simple chords.

I encourage all my students to play music from both worlds, and most of them want to. The skills one aquires from playing jazz and pop are many:
1. Learning to play from pop and jazz from fake books (where you are reading chord symbols rather than actual notation) means you have to have a thorough understanding of chords. Chords and harmony are essential to really understanding Western music, whether classical or non-classical. I find that people coming from traditional classical teachers know very little about chords, if anything. Others have taken theory courses and can name chords but have no idea how to apply that knowledge to actual playing.
2. Jazz and pop have rhythmic complexities that much classical music does not have, at least in the early years of study, such as syncopation.
3. Playing songs help you learn about good phrasing. When you sing, or play a piece of music which was originally written to be sung, you can hear more easily how it should be phrased, because the phrasing mirrors the words. When you sing, you breathe at places that make sense musically; when you play it on the piano, you should also "breathe" in those places. I often tell students to play a piece of music as they would sing it.
4. Jazz and pop do not have such a rigid line between "wrong" notes and "right" notes. Including improvisation in your playing frees you from the fear and anxiety over wrong notes. It helps you to learn to manage "unintended" notes and continue playing. If you play with other people you must learn this skill.

Learning to play classical music can help the jazz or pop pianist as well. There is a greater variety of technical challenges in classical music, so working on these will improve your overall technique. Of course, some non-classical musicians don't read music, and this is a valuable skill to have, even if you play primarily by ear. Playing classical music and hearing how the great geniuses of that genre used harmony and counterpoint can give you new ideas for material to use in your arrangements of jazz or pop tunes.

It is my goal to continue to help my students and my listeners bridge the great divide between classical and non-classical music. They are both wonderful and enjoyable to hear and to play. Even if we live primarily in one world, we still need to have an appreciation for the other worlds. Let's drop the snobbery and embrace the unifying power of music.

Wrong Notes

There is probably no other area of playing the piano (or any instrument) that causes as much consternation, angst, and self-criticism than that of "wrong notes." How we view this, and how we deal with it in our daily practice, will, I believe, either make us or break us as a musician, and, perhaps more important, determine whether we find joy or frustration in our music-making.

A student of mine told me a story about her childhood teacher. The student was playing a piece, and was struggling to manage it, which resulted in, naturally, a fair number of wrong notes. The teacher stopped her, closed the music, and said, indignantly, "This is a waste of my time. Come back when you can play it with fewer wrong notes." Incredible, isn't it? If only the child had said, "Isn't that what you are supposed to be helping me with??" And we've all heard the stories of children who were rapped on the hand every time they played a wrong note. Note errors were, and still are, for many people, sadly, viewed as a personal failing.

The typical approach to wrong notes is simply to "correct" them each time one is played, that is, to stop, play the intended note, and then move on. You probably will have noticed that if you play an incorrect note, it probably happens most of the time, even every time, you play that passage. Stopping to play the "correct" note, in fact, doesn't actually correct the problem. It just reinforces the habit of playing the incorrect note, quickly followed by the correct one. You may have the illusion that you are correcting the problem, but in fact you are making it worse. When you correct a note, you have now altered the rhythm, which is equally a problem, in fact more so than a wrong note or two. I find with many of my students that if they stop to try to fix a note, it invariable leads to another problem right afterwards, and another, and sometimes the whole passage starts to unravel.

When we perform in public, it is universally understood that it is verboten to stop to correct, yet somehow people cling to the belief that they can stop and correct in their daily practice, but when they get on stage they will be able to continue without stopping should a mishap occur. Obviously this isn't the case.

There are many reasons for playing wrong notes. We could have mis-read the note initially and learned it incorrectly, possibly without even realizing it. If so, it may or not be easy to correct, because now we have heard it incorrectly so many times. We could have incorrect or insufficient technique to find and play the note(s) accurately. We could have a weak or incorrect auditory image of how the music is supposed to sound. The auditory image, knowing with absolute inner certainty, how the music should sound, is the single most important factor, in my belief. Without it, your technique, however good, will still not lead you to the correct notes with any real reliability.

How do we strengthen the auditory image? The simplest answer is by REALLY listening. However, when we learn a piece we are often too distracted and even overwhelmed by the number of notes and all the various other aspects, and we are not in fact really hearing the music. That is why I recommend outlining (see previous post) so that we can have fewer notes to manage and have more "space" for listening.

However, the absolute BEST tool for getting the music "into your ear," as I call it, is transposing. If you can transpose a passage, or even better still, the entire piece, you will find out if you really hear the piece. If you can't do this, you just keep at the transposing until it becomes easy. When you transpose to a new key, you are in essence hearing the relationship of all tones to each other. I transpose all my pieces to all other eleven keys, many times over. At first you will need to go slowly, and where your ear fails you, you will use calculation (looking at the music and figuring out the interval distance). Gradually you will do it more and more by ear. For pieces I have studied in depth, I can play the entire piece (including full sonatas of Beethoven, for example) in every key, by memory, slower than the piece is intended, perhaps, but still at a reasonable tempo. Most people find this pretty incredible when I tell them this, but it is absolutely true. In the 35 years I have been doing this, it has transformed my playing in areas such as accuracy and memory. It vastly reduces the pure number of hours it takes to learn a piece. I always find when I am having difficulty with the technical aspect of a piece, strengthening the auditory image of that passage through transposing either helps with the technical accuracy, or often even solves the problem completely. It gives me greater confidence in performing, knowing that I know the piece so well I can overcome any small mishap.

If you are consistently missing a note or a number of notes, your hand is simply not in the right place at the right time to play the correct one. Here, with the help of a perceptive teacher, you need to analyze what you are doing that causes your hand (fingers, arm, even your torso) to be in the wrong place, so to speak. If the teacher points out the incorrect notes but does nothing to help you achieve playing the correct ones, you have the wrong teacher! There can be so many things that can cause your physical mechanism (your body) to be unable to play the correct notes with reliability -- far too many to address here. But when the ear has a rock-solid auditory image and the body is trained to respond to the ear, you can't go wrong.

Lastly, a major cause of wrong notes is the fear of wrong notes! When we are fearful, or demand unreasonable perfection of ourselves, we tighten up physically, which hampers the ability of the body to move smoothly and respond to the music. And the constant fear of or anxiety about wrong notes certainly spoils the enjoyment of playing.

So what to do? When you play a piece of music, PLAY WITHOUT STOPPING! You will not learn wrong notes this way, as people mistakenly believe. Instead, you will keep the rhythm intact (which is extremely important), and you will keep the integrity of the composition rather than chopping it up. Play with all the beauty, expression and creativity you are capable of! Afterwards, you must go back through the places you had errors and try to analyze why you had them. First and foremost, strengthen your auditory image of that passage through transposing. Try transposing with your eyes closed! Play the passage in the original key with eyes closed to see how well your body alone leads you to the correct notes. Investigate whether your hand is twisted or otherwise out of position to play the intended notes. Find a teacher who can really help you with these areas. (In future posts I will try to address more aspects of technique.)

My teacher, Joseph Prostakoff, often said: "If you want to play beautifully, you must learn to love the wrong notes as much as you love the right ones." This is the most profound statement I ever heard about learning to play the piano. I certainly endeavor to play with note-accuracy. I work at it diligently using every tool I have. But I don't let a few wrong notes spoil my experience or joy of playing. I don't play with the fear of having wrong notes. When you experience the freedom of playing without this fear, you will never go back to the old ways.

Exercises for the Piano

I don't believe in traditional exercises for the piano such as Hanon and Czerny. I believe there are several problems with them. In order of importance, these reasons are:

1. They encourage un-musical, mechanical playing. It is very unlikely that the student will play these exercises as beautiful music. Most teachers will say that does not matter, that you are only practicing "technique" and it does not have to be musical. I believe the opposite, that EVERY time you touch the piano you should be practicing playing with full emotional involvement and commitment. As one practices, one becomes. You will get good at whatever you practice. Do you want to become good at playing mechanically? The physical coordination you will use when you are playing with involvement is different than when playing without it, so you cannot practice anything, even "technique," without the full force of your emotions behind it, and then expect that will transfer over to playing your pieces.

2. They kill the enthusiasm for piano. It is very rare to find a student who loves these traditional exercises and can't wait to practice them! More often the student hates these, and for good reason. They just aren't that interesting or fun. Worse, students are often told to practice these first, at the beginning of the practice session, so they start their practice with something unpleasant and this feeling may carry over to the rest of the session.

3. They don't cover the full range of technical challenges. Many of these were written in an era when music was less technically demanding than it is now. Czerny, for example, lived and composed his studies during the time of Mozart. Nothing in his exercises prepares the pianist for the big chords and octaves of Brahms, the lush chords and arpeggios of Chopin, or the shimmering effects of Debussy.

4. Exercises which promote "independence" of the fingers are very detrimental to good playing. We want the fingers to work within the hand and within the arm, not independently. You cannot play a chord, for example, with absolute evenness or extreme softness, if three or four fingers are all trying to do their own thing. The chord must be a unit and must be played by the hand using the power of the arm. This myth that a long arpeggio or even a scale is achieved through each finger acting independently is very insidious. Watch and listen to a great pianist and you will see that a long arpeggio is played with a masterful sweep of the arm, within which the fingers play their part by simply being in the right place at the right time, so to speak.

5. Exercises given to the student may not apply to the pieces he or she is working on at the moment, so maximum efficiency is lost, practicing something that may not be used and applied for months or even years.

Instead, I create my own exercises, which I call "set ups," from the technical challenges of the piece the student is working on. They are done in small amounts and then applied directly to the piece. The set-ups themselves are varied so as to be kept interesting, so the student does them with pleasure.

Sometimes, what seems like a technical difficulty is really a different problem, most often, of not really having the passage "in one's ear." In other words, you do not have a clear auditory image of the passage. To strengthen this, I use various methods, including transposing the passage to other keys. Invariably, when the ear is strengthened, the passage always becomes easier from a technical standpoint.

The area of technique is difficult to grasp by reading about it. It needs to be shown, and then felt and experienced by the student. My lessons are very "hands-on" so the student can sense and experience a new way of doing something. When the body experiences it, and the student knows HOW he or she got to that experience, it will be more likely the student can re-create that process at home. It just cannot be done by mechanically repeating a canned exercise over and over.

When I first started my studies with Joseph Prostakoff 37 years ago, I asked him what I should do with my books of Hanon, Czerny, and many others. "Burn them!" he said. "Burn them immediately!" I give my students the same advice.

Rhythm, Part II

"In the beginning was rhythm." -- Hans von Bulow (19th century pianist and conductor) 

There is much debate among musicologists and music historians as to whether we humans began our musical development with rhythm or with melody. Considering one can't really sing a melody without some kind of rhythm, but that it is possible to have rhythm without melody, my vote would go to rhythm. In any case, I believe that learning to have a great sense of rhythm is paramount, and mastering the rhythm of the pieces we are learning should be the highest priority. I have many students who have come to me, either from other teachers, or self-taught, who try to learn a piece of music (e.g. classical) by learning "the notes" first and then trying to "add" the rhythm. This idea is preposterous. The composer certainly could not have conceived the piece this way. Imagine the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony "without the rhythm!" Of course, there is no such thing as "no rhythm." No matter how you play, you are playing in some rhythm, so shouldn't it be the correct rhythm, as the composer intended? (Here's another area where classical musicians should learn from the jazz musician: no jazz musician could possibly imagine learning a new song without the rhythm!) The biggest problem with the idea of learning it first for just the notes is that you have now heard it incorrectly, and the ear (auditory cortex of the brain) now expects to hear it this way. Once you've gotten a certain rhythm into your ear, it is difficult to change how you hear it. Every time you play you are feeding information to your ear. Why feed it incorrect information which later must be changed? Students new to the piano complain that it is too difficult to concentrate on both notes and rhythm at the first few readings of a new piece. That is where my technique of outlining comes into play (see previous post on this topic). We must give ourselves fewer notes to play so that we can focus on the rhythm, the structure, and full emotional engagement. When the rhythmic/harmonic structure begins to fall into place, we add more details, that is, more notes. If anything, I would say adding all the notes is the lowest priority. In my last post I described my "top down" approach, that is, learning to hear larger units of time and sub-divide them, rather than depend on the traditional method of "counting" the beats. The ability to do this is essential to good outlining. 

Here are some other techniques for strengthening the mastery of the rhythm of a piece. Clapping the rhythm of the melody is always a good idea for the less experienced student. A next step could be tapping (on the closed piano lid) the rhythm of each hand, hands together. To then make the transition to playing, I often have students play the rhythm of, say, the melody, all just on one note. Then both hands, also each just on one note. Then if necessary, keep one hand playing the rhythm of its part on just the single note while the other hand plays the actual notes of its part. Then reverse them. It may sound a bit odd, but I don't find that it is a problem -- you aren't going to learn the notes incorrectly using this method. This way you are able to gradually build up to playing the entire passage without having sacrificed the rhythm. The method of playing just on a single note, as if you were a drummer, works wonders for complicated syncopated music, and also for learning to master cross-rhythms (one hand playing in duple meter while the other plays in triple meter, for example). Speaking of cross rhythms: this is an example of where traditional counting, or using a metronome, is totally useless! 

Learning to interpret the rhythmic notation you see on the page, to hear and play it correctly, without use of un-musical crutches such as counting or the metronome, is only the first hurdle. Music is virtually never played absolutely metrically strictly without nuance, unless its intent is to sound very "techno" or mechanistic. So I work with the students to make rhythmic plasticity part of their playing as soon as possible in the learning of the piece. If you don't, once again you must "un-learn" the rhythm you have heard thus far and learn a new rhythm. I believe this is why amateur pianists (and, I assume, other instrumentalists as well) never really achieve the subtleties of rhythmic nuance that high-level professionals do; they spend too long playing the pieces without it and cannot make the transition.

Rhythm

From my many years of teaching piano, I'd say rhythm is the area that causes pianists just starting out -- and even many who have been playing for quite a while -- the most problems. I believe there are two main reasons for this. The first is that too much priority is given to "learning the notes" at the expense of the rhythm. If rhythm were given highest priority, it would be stronger, and the "notes" would be easier to learn as they ride the momentum of the rhythm. The second reason is that in most of our society, rhythm is taught all wrong. The tools for learning rhythm that are given by most piano teachers, in my opinion, cripple the student in developing a great sense of rhythm rather than help. Two of these tools are "counting" and the metronome. This may seem scandalous to you. "Counting" (saying the beats and subdivision of the beats, "one-and-two-and-three-and" etc.) is considered by many to be such a basic tool for the study of any instrument, and has been for so many years, that almost no one questions it. Yet even with this tool, many teachers tear out their hair when they hear many a student "counting" -- well, at least they are saying the numbers -- but totally out of rhythm! Saying the numbers "one two three four" does not guarantee you are saying them in a steady, rhythmic way. So that is where the metronome comes in. The teachers will insist the student practice with the metronome, playing to the strict tick-tocking of a mechanical device, so that you keep your counting steady. (This doesn't guarantee success either; you could think you are playing your quarter notes to the metronome correctly, but your subdivisions of the quarter notes could still be wrong.) If you've ever done this, and if you haven't you can probably imagine, it's not very fun. It doesn't sound like it would produce beautiful, artistic playing, does it? Somehow, people would have us believe that you should practice for years to the strict tyranny of the metronome, while also hearing the chattering of your own voice saying "one and two and..." and then one day you flip a switch and you will play Chopin with gorgeous nuance of rhythm. I always say, "If you can REALLY HEAR the rhythm, you don't need to count. And if you can't hear it, no amount of counting will help you." So, how do we learn to REALLY HEAR the rhythm? If I had my way, we'd all spend lots of time playing drums and other rhythm instruments in early childhood, as they do in some cultures, before we ever start other instruments. When parents call me about lessons for a 3 or 4-year old, that is what I tell them. But if you didn't have the benefit of doing that, you can still learn to have a good sense rhythm. 

Think about the following analogy: You are given a log to chop into four even pieces (length-wise, as the log is lying on the ground), but you have no measuring tape. You "eyeball" it, and chop it in half. With a little practice, or perhaps even the first time, you will do this with a fairly high degree of accuracy. Then you would repeat the process, chopping each half into half, giving you four even quarters of the log. You wouldn't start at one end of the log, chop a piece you hope will end up being a quarter, continue on to chop the next piece and so on, would you? Yet this is precisely the concept of "counting:" you start with one, move on to two, etc., without having any sense of the size of the whole. Furthermore, when you chop the log, it's the pieces of the log you are ultimately interested in, not the cuts. But when you count as you play, you are emphasizing the equivalent of the cuts (the notes), not the log, which is the time in between the notes. If you can't really hear the time in between the notes, you can't tell if your rhythm is correct. Here is how I use that concept to teach rhythm. 

Sit comfortably on a chair, preferably one without arms which will get in your way. You are going to set up a "log" in time by clapping on your left side (think of 9:00 on a clock) and another clap on your right side (3:00). Move steadily back and forth clapping at the same interval of time on your left and right. Keep doing this until you really feel you hear the unit of time that is essentially defined by your claps. The time AND space in between your left and right claps is your log. Now, going from left to right, put another clap half-way between the left and right claps. Place this clap in front of you, at 12 noon. If you don't have a teacher guiding you, you will have to really listen and try to determine if you have put your clap exactly half way in the temporal (time) dimension. You are just "ear-balling" it, as you eye-balled the log, since you have no external measuring device. I find most people do not do it correctly the first try (some do), but most get it after a few tries, without my demonstrating it to them. (If I demonstrate for them, they are able to imitate me, but that does not develop their sense of rhythm to as great a degree.) It's important that you keep moving smoothly between claps, not rigidly, as this gives you a sense of the flow of time, and also helps you stay focused on the time in between the claps (the pieces of the log), not just the claps (the cuts). After you've cut in half, you cut each half again, putting your new claps temporally and spatially half-way between your half-way claps, giving you quarters. In terms of musical notation, what you have just clapped is two measures, starting with a whole note in each measure. The first measure began on your left side, the second on your right. The clap on your right side feels like the end of the first measure, but it's also the beginning of the second, because this is how music works: it is almost always "driving" to the downbeat (first beat) of the next measure. We only cut, or subdivided, the first measure; that's why you didn't clap from right to left. Your half-way clap gave you two half-notes in the first measure; the next claps divided those, giving you four quarter notes in the measure. That is why those notes have those names! Whole note means a whole unit, half note means a half and quarter note means a quarter. Brilliant! You can see this method is a top-down approach, starting with the largest unit and breaking down into successively smaller units. Traditional methods teach the small unit, the quarter note, first, apply your "counting" to the quarter notes, and then count the various other values accordingly, which leads to a very stiff, un-musical kind of playing. The beauty of the top-down approach to rhythm is that you did it all without saying any numbers or listening to an external device. Rather, you just concentrated your attention on the pure empty space between the claps and learned to really HEAR it. This may sound very Zen, but I believe it's absolutely true, and is necessary if you want to play truly well. Being able to hear the whole measure and subdivide it into beats and divisions of beats is essentially a prerequisite to being able to effectively "outline" a composition, as I describe in my previous post about this method. And being able to outline and hear the music in larger units (not just beat to beat) will help you achieve the often-elusive "long line" or "phrasing" that musicians seek. We would then proceed to divide into eights and so on. We'd also learn to divide the log in three even pieces -- more challenging (just as a real log would be) since you can't start by chopping in half. After that you can learn to chop into any combination of pieces. We also chop different sizes of logs, from very long ones and very short ones. (Which do you think is more challenging?) I spend a lot of time with my students chopping logs. Gradually, they know it so well they can look at a rhythm on the page and just know how it sounds, as hopefully, all accomplished musicians do. But they always have the log-chopping tool to fall back on if they encounter a rhythmic pattern they don't immediately get. They all agree it's not only more effective, it's less arduous and more fun. The process described above would be much easier to understand if you saw and heard it, rather than read about it (perhaps a video will be in a future post). But for now, I hope you will try it. If you have questions, please email me (deborah@pianobrilliance.com). In my next post I'll give you more tools for strengthening your rhythm.

Playing Hands Together

In my last post, I introduced the idea of outlining, learning a new piece of music by playing a sketch first, and gradually adding more detail. I emphasized the importance of playing hands together so that you can hear the full structure and texture of the piece.

There are so many reasons to play hands together that I cannot stress the importance of it enough.

By now probably everyone is aware that the brain has two hemispheres, the right and left, with the left side controlling the right hand, and vice versa. In between them is the corpus callosum, a bundle of neural fibers, which allows for the communication between the two hemispheres. “It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200–250 million contralateral axomic projections.” (Wikipedia) It is known to be significantly larger in musicians than non-musicians, and it is somewhat larger in people who are left-handed or ambidextrous.

We’ve all heard people referred to as “right-brained” or “left-brained,” left-brained being the more logical, linear thinker, and right-brained being the more creative, non-linear thinker. While this is a vast oversimplification, there is certainly some truth to it. Presumably, if you want to be balanced and excel at both types of thinking, you’d want to develop both hemispheres of your brain, or, more to the point, to develop the part which connects them, and allows them to work together, the corpus callosum. This can be achieved by engaging in activities which use both halves of your brain, but also in activities that use both hands equally. It makes sense that the corpus callosum is larger is people who are ambidextrous, since they use left and right hands more equally, and in left-handed people, who are often somewhat ambidextrous, having had to adapt to a right-handed world.

One could make the case that if you want to be a great musician, you need to excel at both left-brain and right-brain skills, and I am convinced this is so. Musical is very logical and mathematical, or left-brain. Mathematical ratios are at the core of the vibrations and relationship between vibrations which give us tones, the musical scale, and so on. Most musical compositions have an inherent structure which is logical, often symmetrical, and it what allows the listener to follow and make sense of a piece of music as it unfolds in time. Yet music is also emotional and holistic, very right-brain. To be a great composer or performer, you must be very creative, expressive, communicative, passionate – these are right-brain strengths.

Here’s the great news: the very act of listening to music helps develop your brain, because processing music uses more parts of the brain simultaneously than any other activity. (I recommend Daniel Leviton’s book, “This is Your Brain on Music,” and Oliver Sacks’ “Musicophilia,” for more information on this.) Playing a musical instrument develops it even more. This has been well-documented; we’ve heard of “the Mozart effect” – that is, when children play an instrument, their brains grow faster and they excel at other subjects and other areas of life more than children who don’t play an instrument. (By the way, it isn’t limited to children; we now know that adults can still grow their brains at any age.) Musicians get the best of both: your brain grows by listening to and processing music, and the corpus callosum grows by using and connecting the two hemispheres (the logical and emotional) and by using both hands simultaneously.

When you play hands together, you build the corpus callosum, which will help you be a better musician. In my post about outlining, I also stressed the importance of playing with emotional engagement right from the start as well, because, of course, this also engages your right hemisphere and builds more connections.

New students coming to me often say it’s too difficult to play pieces hands together right from the start. That’s because your brain doesn’t yet have the neural connections in the corpus callosum to do so. If you’ve ever tried to rub your stomach with one hand and pat your head with the other, you may have found you couldn’t do it at first. But as you kept at it, your brain developed the connections to do that activity, and from then on you can do it easily. So it is with just about everything. Every time you play hands together, even if it’s with very few notes, you increase your ability to play hands together the next time.

I once had a student come to me from another teacher. He was a beginner but the teacher started him out on classical pieces such as Bach’s Minuet in G, but had him learn it hands separately. The student made some brief attempts to put hands together, but at the first difficulty he had gone back to playing them separately, figuring he needed more practice on each hand’s part. He spent eight months playing nothing but hands separately! No wonder it was so difficult: his poor brain never had a chance to develop the neurons it needed.

Do I ever recommend one-handed practice? Yes and no. Sometimes I want to play one hand’s part so I can hear it really clearly. For example, we often don’t hear the bass part, our left-hand’s part, as clearly as we hear the right hand (the ear gravitates towards the highest frequencies). But if I’m playing, say, the bass line, why not have the right hand play along with it, doubled at the octave? Who knows – your right hand will probably have something like this at some time in your life, so you are getting to practice it ahead of time! Now you have the benefit of hearing the bass line clearly, but you are still playing hands together. If you want to develop more neurons in the corpus callosum, cross your hands and play the line doubled and with hands crossed. Now your brain really has to work! If you try it you will see what I mean…

And yes, I admit, sometimes a passage is so challenging I work on it hands separately. But I do this only the minimum amount necessary.

Life is too short and practice time too precious to spend it with one hand sitting in your lap. Play hands together! It will make you a better musician and a more balanced person.

Outlining

In my previous post, I talked about the importance – and the fun – of playing by ear, that is, without the aid of written music. In this post, I want to suggest a way of learning from written music that may be new to most of you, and is a fantastic tool. I always use it when learning a new piece, especially classical music, and can’t imagine doing it any other way. It’s called “outlining.”

When we write an essay (or a novel, for that matter), the first thing we would do is to outline our main ideas. Then we would proceed to fill in more details, which may lead to changes in the outline, until a satisfactory structure emerges, at which point we may begin writing the actual text. When we build a house, we build the foundation and structural components first, then more infrastructure, and the small decorative details come last. The same is true for almost all projects of any size that one can think of. This is intuitively obvious. Yet when it comes to learning a piece of music, the traditional way is simply to play note-by-note (usually excruciatingly slowly), from beginning to end, without regard to structural elements versus detail. Sometimes pianists will play one hand alone, then the other, from beginning to end. The slow tempo does not always give a true sense of the piece, and certainly playing one hand alone means that a great deal of the melody or harmony, or both, are missing.

Does it really make sense to learn a piece this way? Could there be another way? You will see that “outlining” a piece of music solves many problems at once, is ultimately much more enjoyable once you get the hang of it, and will give you a much better end result.

If you are trying this for the first time, start with a piece which is not terribly challenging for you. Music that is more “structural” would be easier – perhaps Mozart or Beethoven – rather than something more free or improvisatory, such as Debussy. Later, when you are more skilled at it, you will find any piece can be approached this way.

The process for outlining a new piece of music is roughly as follows:

At a relaxed tempo, yet one that is somewhat close to the intended tempo of the piece, play what comes on the first beat of every measure. It is important to play hands together, so that you can hear the full texture of the music. (More on the importance of hands together in future posts.) Keep your tempo steady, and do not hold the notes down for the full measure, but rather allow there to be “empty space” in between the downbeats, which will later be “filled in” with more detail. It is also very important not to stop to correct notes, as this destroys the rhythm, which is an integral part of the structure you are trying to hear. This is probably the most difficult practice for musicians to embrace, the concept of allowing the playing “wrong notes.” Although I will discuss this at length in future posts, here I will just say that you should try to remember you a playing essentially a “sketch” of the piece. Just as a painter may sketch out his painting with the rough outlines of his shapes, which may later change somewhat, you are also just “sketching.” It is much more important to continue without interruption than to constantly stop, correct, re-start, which destroys the “wholeness” of the piece. In outlining, “less is more.” If you are having difficulty, play fewer notes. If you can play most of the notes and/or chords that come on the first beats, you will hear the harmonic structure of the piece emerge. You will get a sense of “where the piece is going.” Ideally you are staying very relaxed, and REALLY LISTENING. I find that when people learn the traditional way, note by note, the process of trying to read and find all the notes is so all-absorbing, that there is very little actual listening going on. It is also desirable that you play with emotional involvement, right now, right from your very first brush with the piece. My students usually look at me as if I am crazy when I suggest this, but yes, the emotional involvement (or what many would call “expression”) is not something like a coat of paint that you slap on at the end, when you know “all the notes.” It should be built in right from the very start, the first time your hands touch the music.

The first time outlining, try to get through the entire piece this way. (If the piece is in multiple movements, I am considering one movement to be the piece.) Later you can work in large sections if you find it necessary.

Once you are somewhat comfortable with just first beats, start adding more. Remember, you are listening for structural elements. Therefore, something like a trill or grace note is certainly detail, not structure. When adding in more, play what you feel is easiest to add in. Don’t try to fill in a difficult or fast arpeggio, for example. Find the elements you can play easily so you can stay relaxed, without any feeling of panic. If you need to, the mid-way point of the measure (e.g. the 3rd beat if the piece is in 4/4, or the second beat if it is in 2/4) would be easy and logical. However, it is most ideal if your sketch of the piece can be somewhat improvisatory. In other words, you have a very playful approach, very spontaneous, so that you yourself do not always know what you will play next. In fact, no two outlining sessions should ever be exactly alike. If you approach it in this way, it will feel like PLAY more than WORK, and you will have a more joyful experience, as well as a more fluid-sounding final product.

Some pieces can be learned in their entirety this way. For more challenging pieces, you will likely find it necessary to isolate certain passages for more detailed work, including, perhaps, some hands separately. But “spot work” can tend to chop the piece up, so I recommend balancing it with outlining, to keep a sense of the wholeness of the piece. Even after I know “all the notes” of a piece, I find that outlining with a sense of improvisatory playfulness keeps it fresh and interesting.